To make a short story long:
Good old Phillips! I have the same problem with this drive. I bought an HP Pavillion that was running Win 98se and Easy CD Creator and it was working great. I upgraded to XP Professional and there is no driver for the CD-RW drive. So I contact Phillips and after much running around and emails to other divisions of Phillips I find the people who make the drive. The online tech support guy tells me to start stepping through all the steps I have already gone through to diagnose the problem. He tells me he must go through these steps with me to get resolution so I jump through all the hoops again and low and behold it still doesn't work. His solution is to load the driver from the win98se cd which of course does not contain the correct driver. His final answer is" It should work, that is what my documentation says". How do you like that? He says Phillips is the drive name but they are an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) so they are not responsible for the drive. Funny HP says they sell the machine but it is a phillips drive so they are not responsible. So I said someone there must have been working with the drive and XP surely you have a tech I can contact for a copy but this person answers questions from somewhere other than the development site and confesses that he himself has never even opened a pc before nor has he installed software. He answers calls and gets prompts for problems by key word association.
And all this time I thought I was the only trained monkey on the planet!
Ez-CD Creator is now owned by Roxio. Roxio has a working driver but it will cost you. They want you to buy the latest version of their software to get the driver which burnes me up! Someone I know has the right version of the Roxio software and I will attempt to extract the correct driver later today. If you still don't have the drivers you need email me and I will send you what I get ok?
Right after that I am going to post it on Drivers.com and Ineeddrivers.com and every driver site I can think of to post it coz this is BS!